The Left avoids talking about Muslim antisemitism, preferring to focus on the antisemitism of the Right. If it did talk about Muslim antisemitism, it would also have to talk about Muslim colonialism, argues Daniel Greenfield in Rightside News.
Benjamin Hattab at the funeral of his son Yoav: forced to praise how well Tunisia treats Jews
Muslim anti-Semitism predates the difficulties of integrating
Algerians and Pakistanis into Europe by over a thousand years. In Islam,
Jews represent both a subject race and a primal enemy. Israel
infuriates Muslims so much not because they care a great deal about the
Palestinian Arabs who have been expelled in huge numbers from Muslim
countries within the last generation, but because Jews no longer know
their place. Islam is supremacist. Allahu Akbar asserts Islamic
supremacy over all other religions. As an historical subject race, Jews
are a natural target for violence by Muslim immigrants with strong
supremacist leanings. The disenfranchised Muslim isn’t looking for
equality. He’s seeking supremacy. That is what the Islamic State and the
Koran give him. He picks the same Jewish targets as Mohammed did
because the Jews are a vulnerable minority. That is as true in Europe
today as it was in Arabia then.
Unlike the Christian world, which was never fully subjugated by
Islam, both the Jewish homeland and much of the Jewish diaspora
population existed under Muslim rule long enough that non-submissive
Jews became a particularly galling reminder of the fall of the
Caliphate.
Muslims had taken Jewish submission for granted making the
existence of non-submissive Jews, whether in Jerusalem or in Paris, that
much more outrageous. The Algerian Muslim can more readily accept
taking a back seat to a French Christian than to an Algerian Jew, whom
he knows would have been considered inferior to him if they were both
back in Algeria.
The left has become so mired in a post-colonial worldview that it
refuses to understand that the struggle is not between Western European
colonialism and a post-colonial Third World, but between different eras
of colonialism. Arab Islamic domination is not post-colonial; it’s a
colonialism that predates it.
When Western leftists make common cause with Arab and Islamic
nationalists, they aren’t being post-colonial, they’re advocating an
earlier form of colonialism that led and is once again leading to ethnic
cleansing, genocide, mass slavery and the destruction of indigenous
cultures; including that of the Jews.
Middle Eastern Jews, like other non-Muslim and non-Arab
minorities, welcomed European colonialism as relief from Islamic and
Arab colonialism. France is filled with Jews from North Africa because
they received their rights for the first time under French rule. As
French citizens, they could shed their mandatory black clothes and no
longer fear being killed because of Islamic law, like Batto Sfez, a
Tunisian Jew who was executed for blasphemy in an atrocity that
triggered French intervention.
Yoav Hattab, one of the Jews murdered in the Kosher supermarket
attack in Paris, was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Tunisia. While the
Chief Rabbi was, in the unfortunate Dhimmi fashion of those who live
under Islamic rule, forced to praise how well Tunisia treats Jews, his
son was buried in Israel. Israel was also the place where most Tunisian
Jews moved to escape Arab Muslim persecution.
The Western left can’t talk about Muslim anti-Semitism because it
would also have to talk about Muslim colonialism. And then the entire
basis of its approach to the Arab and Muslim world would collapse. If
post-colonialism in the Middle East is just the replacement of one
colonialism with another, then the left would have to admit that it has
once again disgraced itself by supporting a totalitarian system.
Just as it replaced the czar with the commissar, it is replacing the protectorate with the caliphate.
Modern histories of the Middle East excuse the historical Muslim
persecution of Jews for the same reason the media excuses modern Muslim
attacks on Jews. This historical revisionism justifies Islamic
colonialism in the service of post-colonialism with the myth of a golden
age of benevolent tyranny.
The post-colonial narrative obligates academics and journalists
to favorably contrast the Muslim treatment of Jews, then or now, with
the European treatment of Jews. This obstructionism has endangered
European Jews even more than Jihadist videos advocating violence because
it makes it impossible to discuss an urgent violent threat for fear of
violating the left’s post-colonial narrative.
Muslim anti-Semitism must be discussed. And it must be
contextualized within the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, not
European ones like the National Front or Jobbik. It must not be
dismissed as some transient phenomenon caused by poverty or the latest
Hamas clashes, but viewed within the context of Islamic colonialism and
the treatment of non-Muslims in the Muslim world. The treatment of
Yazidis in Iraq and Christians in Syria must also be placed within that
same context.
Historical revisionism for Muslim anti-Semitism is as
unacceptable as Holocaust denial or any other attempt to stick a smiley
face on the oppression of Jews. And what is at stake here is not merely
history, but the root cause that drives Muslim men and women born in
Europe to attack and kill Jews.
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I frankly see the Arab-Israeli conflict as a battle between two nationalist movements but with many different factions within both camps.
ReplyDeleteFor example As'ad AbuKhalil of the "Angry Arab News Service" blog is a former Marxist-Leninist, now supposedly an anarchist but his views and the views of other activists like him are born more out a general Arab nationalism and human rights then a desire to become overlords over the "kaffir" like the members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaeda, Daesh, etc.
They may not express their intolerance in the same way, but Arab nationalists have never had room for non-Arabs and non-Muslims, their parties standing for virulent totalitarianism. The Angry Arab cloaks his views in the language of human rights because that is what works best with his English-speaking audience.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Bataween on this. We have had a lot of experience with Arab nationalists, pan-Arabists, and pan-Islamists, etc.
ReplyDeleteJust to give you an example from a non-Arab but Muslim context, look at the Turkish nationalist party usually called the Young Turks in the West. The party was the Committee for Unity and Progress. Wow, unity and progress, you can hardly beat a beautiful name like that.
Yet these unity and progress Komitadjis are the ones who carried out the Armenian genocide during WW One which murdered about 1 1/2 Armenians. So you have to be careful about taking labels like nationalist and pan-nationalist and socialist workers party too seriously. After all, the Nazi party was formally called the National Socialist German Workers Party. What could go wrong with a name like that?
The Ottoman govt under the unity and progress komitadjis murdered about 1.5 million Armenians.
ReplyDeleteHave either of you ever read his blog? Or Ali Abunimah's "One Country"? Just curious if you did but in either case my point is that while the anti-Zionist movement is not a monolithic, anti-Semitic conspiracy even if many, many anti-semites and/or Islamists tend to hide behind the label.
ReplyDeleteGranted there is a lot of things wrong with the traditional "anti-Israel" narrative but I cannot shake the fact that there needs to be a reckoning with the events of 1947 - 48 and what actually occurred in Palestine that led to the refugee problem and Israel's post war nation building. As remarkable as it may seem a lot of people around the world and not just in the Muslim world do not agree with Zionism or how the modern state of Israel was founded.
True, a lot of people in the West are rabid antisemites. That's what anti-Zionists are. John
DeleteYes I have read his blog. Angry by name, angry by nature. The Palestinian refugee problem is a by-product of the decision of seven Arab states to go to war in 1948. They lost.Too bad. If they hadn't gone to war there would have been no Arab refugees. On the other hand, knowing what we know of the intolerance the Arab Muslims have shown towards non-Muslims, there WOULD have been a Jewish refugee problem EVEN IF ISRAEL HAD NEVER BEEN ESTABLISHED.
ReplyDeleteBetaween I have been meaning to ask you actually about the flight of Jews from Arab lands post-1948.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell there was little Zionist activism among those communities prior to expulsions (or might as well be called expulsions) of members of those communities. You mentioned there probably would have been an exodus anyway. Were there plans for such an event among the Arab elite or militant nationalist intellegensia prior to the war in Palestine?
Yes
ReplyDeletehttp://www.zionism-israel.com/hdoc/Arab_League_Law_Jews.htm
not only were there plans to dispossess Jews and expel them from Arab lands, plans made before the UN GA partition recommendation of 11/1947, but the first refugees in the Land of Israel after that UNGA vote were Jews driven from their homes by Arabs.
ReplyDeleteMaphisto should also take account of Arab collaboration in the Holocaust, especially but not only in the person of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the top leader of the palestinian Arabs, appointed by the British High Commissioner in 1921 or 1922.
Why shouldn't leftist excuse Moslem antisemitism? Leftists have excused everything else about Islam from oppression of women to religious persecution to terrorism and military aggression.
ReplyDelete